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On 10/1/19 10:30 AM, DFreinkel wrote:
The about if it’s working why change it...
The point is these sites do not write new code using the current technology but prefer to continue 30 year old practices
Darryl Freinkel
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<start soapbox>
And let us not kid ourselves, if you're talking about old old code like
from 1995 for example, and most especially with code that gets patches
and more patches, you're making it more and more fragile. I've been
working on a program like that. When I was at one very big company
everybody's heard of, they had old old code, and the managers were very
technical and up to date, but oh no, do NOT refactor that code! Just do
the request and get out, and make it right!
It should be needless to say, for us guys that rotate on call, we had
guaranteed two or three nights we'd get calls at 3 AM, 4 AM, and
anywhere before after and in between. And that's with the guys in India
taking care of the "easy" ones. They put the new guys on call with a
back-up coach, mentor, whatever they called them.
At least where I work they decided the code was unwieldy. For a long
time they kept the code back for the programmers who had deep and wide
knowledge of the code but were not interested in the newest stuff. I'm
told one guy still uses GOTO's! In new code! His programs are good
structured code if you don't have IF and DO.
Around 2016 or 2017 they decided they needed to do something. They
started shopping for a software suite but somebody at IBM convinced them
to modernize the code they have. They trained the programmers that
wanted to learn new stuff, and started using guidelines and rules, and
they encourage reasonable conversion of old code to free-format RPG.
*Yay*! And that's when I came on board, they were looking for current
skill.
They call it "technical debt" when you don't code it like you should the
first time, but guaranteed an old shop with lots of old code has a
subroutine copied all over the place that can be consolidated into one
or two procedures. Lots of places with 50 lines of code that could go
into one SQL statement.
</end soapbox>
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